(courtesy Simon & Schuster UK)
In his atmospherically-titled novel, The Betrayal Of Thomas True, A. J. West manages a rare and enthrallingly intense double feat.
He delivers up a epically tense mystery, a race of one man to uncover the spy who has betrayed the “mollies” of 1715 London, often effeminate (but not always), leaving them dead in the festering alleys of a crowded and raucously dirty city while telling one of the most profoundly meaningful beautiful love stories you are ever likely to come across.
He accomplishes this masterful balancing act all while folding in, with barely a scribbled not showing or expository detail looking out of place, what must have been a huge amount of meticulous research as he depicts a capital city of a world power on the rise which is witnessing huge amounts of wealth coming in all even as many of its poorer inhabitants, and they are legion, are left behind.
Into this dog-eat-dog world steps our eponymous protagonist, a twenty-year-old innocent abroad who leaves the then-rural surrounds of Highgate in what is now the dense urban sprawl of modern London, where his cruelly authoritarian rector father rules with an unflinchingly religious morality which brooks no divergence from any and all Biblically-set societal norms.
He has suffered greatly at his father’s hands and of the bullies in his hometown who attack with impunity and a sense of moral right, twisted though it is, and hopes that his arrival in London heralds a new and glorious personal age.
Gabriel huffed, returning to work. Whoever Jack’s friend was, he’d be one of those popular, strutting men, no doubt: effortlessly handsome with a wealth of friends and barrels of confidence. he rested his hammer and twisted his mouth. Will Jack bring him to Clap’s he wondered, his heart squeezing with a pang of jealousy. And are they in love?
As The Betrayal Of Thomas True begins, you are struck first and foremost by how buoyantly optimistic our soon-to-be-beloved protagonist is.
It soon becomes clear that London is as cruel a place for gay man of any stripe as Highgate ever was, and sadly is, terrorised by the thugs and moral know-it-alls of The Society for the Reformation of Manners, who seek to impose a rigid heteronormative morality on the gay men of London who frequent the molly bars and houses that pepper London, hidden away in back alleys and behind more conventional eating and drinking establishments.
While The Society may be lauded by many of London’s more “proper” souls, it is feared by the mollies, which soon includes Thomas himself who, on his first night in the city, discovers a world where the freedom to be yourself is paramount and where men who have to hide their true selves during the day time, can find liberating authenticating self-expression at night, dressing up in women’s clothing and adopting female names and entering marriages with other men with whom they find the true love that has evaded them in their work-a-day lives.
It is in many ways a haven, and while, like any community it can be wildly inconsistent and ferociously unforgiving at times, it is by and large a place where all the terrors and horrors visited upon gay men, who must get married and have children in a veneer if respectability they must wear well though unwillingly, are absent and they can blessedly and finally be who they are.
(courtesy official author site)
Idyllic though they may be, the molly houses that Thomas discovers and which give him a home and a promise of real love with carpenter Gabriel Griffin, who moonlights as Lotty, the burly man who guards one particular molly establishment, have a “Rat” within them, a man, it is supposed, who is supplying identities of the carefully-cloaked denizens to the morality judges and police who will give the modern day Taliban a real run for their ruinously zealous money.
It is the rush to uncover to find out who this mole is, by Gabriel Griffin who is placed in a terrible position by one particular member of London’s security apparatus that powers the full speed ahead, gripping narrative of The Betrayal Of Thomas True which is written with a poetic beauty that belies the evil acts and violent deeds at its heart.
This is a story that carries a heavy burden and a sorrowful tale, and yet for all the weight of darkness and cruelty that falls upon it, The Betrayal Of Thomas True is also the story of how Thomas and Gabriel fall softly but momentously in love and how the purity of that connection may just be what saves them both.
Assuming, of course, that Gabriel can find the informant, who is actually named The Rat, and stop the young, and not-so-young gay men of London being murdered by vigilantes or hung at public exhibitions that are officially state sanctioned.
Thomas was about to answer, when he felt the ground quake, and he looked up to see a huge shadow lumbering over him straight into their prey, flinging the man to the dirt. Thomas laughed, rolling onto his back with his arms and legs spread wide.
‘That’s it, Gabriel,’ he said, gasping for breath as the clouds slid across the blue sky, ‘don’t let him go. We caught him. We caught the rat!’
You hope against hope, because you have fallen in love with Thomas and yet his hopeful view of the world, which while traumatised by past mistreatment, is somehow still buoyantly and vivaciously intact, that the informant will be unmasked, the molly houses and those who call them temporarily home will be saved, and that true love will be upheld as one of the most beautiful things there is, no matter who is caught in its wondrous thrall.
And you also crave that justice be served, that the evilness visited upon the eighteen century mollies of London will be thwarted and that some measure of humanity will prevail and that it will become apparent, as it is in The Betrayal Of Thomas True, that the greatest crime of all is not loving being yourself and loving who you will, but betraying someone who has placed their trust in you.
It is clear in West’s deftly-written novel, which is heavy on the messaging without it once feeling forced or burdensome, who the real monsters are and who it is real and true and practising love in its most beautiful form, but it is touch-and-go much of the time if any justice will ever be done.
As the novel surges and races to its emotionally intense final act, with ups and downs on a quite graphic scale, you will be on the edge of your seat and with your heart in your mouth, hoping and praying that Thomas will find his optimism justified, that Gabriel will succeed against the forces arrayed against him, and that in a world which seems to routinely abhor and punish those who are different, that truth and authenticity will have their day and that true love of a most wonderfully same-sex kind will be allowed to find its true place and home and be safe for as long as the two beautiful men at the heart of this story live.